The present invention relates to electronic document processing and, more particularly, to formatting of the content of electronic documents.
An electronic document (hereinafter referred to as “document”) may be generated by using computer document processing software such as Lotus® Symphony® and Microsoft® Word®, which contains such content as text, charts and graphics, etc.
In the process of generating a document using document processing software, format pattern of the content of the document may be configured for the content of the document. For example, font style, font and color, etc., may be configured for textual content.
To facilitate users to set the format pattern for the content of a document, some document processing software allows users to apply the format pattern of one content to another, so that the latter will have the same format pattern as the former.
For example, Microsoft® Word® provides a tool called “Format Painter”. A user that is in editing a document can apply or copy the format pattern of existing texts in the document to other texts. If the user wishes to use a text format pattern already existed in the document, he/she may select the text or graphics (or “sample object”) of which the format pattern will be copied, click the “Format Painter”  icon on the “common” toolbar, and then click the text or graphics (or “target object”) which is to be formatted. As a result, the format pattern of the target object will become the same as the sample object.
With the above method of copying format pattern, only one format pattern may be copied each time. If the sample object contains multiple paragraphs and each paragraph has a different type of format pattern, then the above method can only apply the format pattern of one paragraph contained in the sample object, but it can not simultaneously apply the format patterns of individual paragraphs to different paragraphs of the target object.